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At NYC Climate Week last month, I happened to be listening to a panel where a Democratic politician gave a passionate plea. If only our leaders and our communities had the will to act on climate change, maybe we could make some progress.
The will?
78% of registered voters in the U.S. support funding more research into renewable energy sources, 72% support generating renewable energy on public land, and 56% support solar farms in their community according to the Yale Center for Climate Communication. Among Democrats, those first two numbers are into the nineties. As politicians go, the percentage of climate deniers in the U.S. Congress as classified by the Center for American Progress has been on the decline, down to 23%. Among Democrats, they identified none. Though still alarming to have any leaders denying scientific facts, I would posit that a supermajority of both voters and politicians have the will to act on climate change.
It’s not a will problem. It’s especially not a will problem for a blue politician in a blue state.
And increasingly, will seems to have nothing to do with progress. Last month, the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), the national trade association for the American solar industry, released their latest Solar Market Insight Report, which garnered attention for one surprising finding. In the first half of 2026, of the ten states that installed the most solar, eight voted for Trump in 2024.
Texas, Arizona, Florida, and Michigan lead the ranking, followed by blue Illinois and California. Four red states, Indiana, Ohio, Missouri, and Utah, then round out the top ten. Overall, states that voted for Trump account for 70% of new solar.
The easy response is that this finding is just the result of statistical cherrypicking. Texas and Florida are enormous states, Michigan is a purple state (and henceforth will be classified as such in this article) with both parties winning several statewide contests in the last decade, and solar installations for six months hardly represents the overall market. And fair enough. To be clear, I’m not rooting for the red states, I’m just the messenger.
So naturally, while my partner was at a birthday party, I spent one September Saturday compiling all of SEIA’s publicly available data for all fifty states plus Washington DC and Puerto Rico into a spreadsheet to see if red states were truly doing a better job building new solar at scale. Turns out, if we tally states’ current solar capacity, they’re neck and neck, and in the next five years, SEIA’s projections would have red states take a commanding lead.
Though not as stark as the eight out of ten headline, this data should be concerning to Democratic leaders. The states whose leaders champion climate causes, impose renewable portfolio standards, and create every incentive for solar can’t keep up with the states whose leaders range from neutral to outright hostile toward renewable energy. Why?
Though I’d expect enormous variation from state to state, I suspect the answer lies in the generally pro-business, low-regulation attitudes of red states that create easier permitting processes both for utility-scale solar farms themselves and for industries demanding the electricity those solar farms produce. Solar costs have fallen about 90% over the last decade, now well below any fossil fuel alternative even without subsidies. While blue state mandates, incentives, grants, decarbonization targets, and goodwill surely don’t hurt the industry, a “get out of the way and let the best energy source win” policy seems to outperform the top-down approach as solar widens its economic advantage.
Of course, this specific data point does not erase a long legacy of Republican leaders giving preferential treatment to fossil fuels, stripping clean energy tax credits, and casting doubt on the science underlying climate change. But if Democrats want blue states to fill that void and lead the next phase of the energy transition, they may need to spend less time demonstrating willpower and setting lofty targets and more time simply making sure solar is cheap, predictable, and fast to build in their states. With today’s mature solar market, climate policy should increasingly look less like the government directing an energy transition from the top down — and more like clearing the way for markets to deliver one.